Removing/Deleting Webpages

While I continue to learn more about my site and what it's visitors/advertisers want, the more I have to keep changing things unfortunately. Now I need to do a massive delete job to get rid of some of my sites offerings that haven't seemed to be very important at all. This means deleting probably 50 of 150 pages. What is the best way to handle this?

Am I going to totally kill my seo? My site is just finally starting to appear back in the engines due to large redirect job I had to do but will this damage me again? I'm not worried about the search terms that coincide with the pages I'm deleting but I was hoping not to hurt the pages that I am keeping.

I hate to do this and risk screwing myself up with google again but I've got to kill the dead-weight on the website so I can create more useful pages in it's place.

Thanks for any advice!

I would think to redirect but the pages that I'd be redirecting too really don't match up very well and it seems like a redirect would piss google off even more since I already have a bunch : (

Not to worry... Just do a 301 redirect from the pages that have been ranking at all or receiving traffic to the most relevant of the remaining page(s) that you are keeping. Even if you don't 301 the pages you are deleting, it should not affect the remaining pages. Just don't throw away traffic on purpose, i.e. 301 the old to the most relevant.

We recently deleted over 3000 pages and getting ready to delete about 1500 more...

We redirected a hundred with with great links or nice traffic to relevant existing content or brand new content.

The rest were redirected to an internal category page.

We expect to see rankings increases on the pages that received the 301s.

Wow, and I thought I had alot to delete...LOL.

So another worry with the 301's is that they are already being 301'd from an old domain?

... hmmm....

I don't know how that will work from an SEO perspective... I wonder how much of the linkvalue or anchor text value will pass.

Has anyone seen a published study about linkvalue passing from a URL that has a two step 301?

If it matters... I'm highly doubtful that there are any links to these specific pages at all and surely they are not bookmarked.

In that case I would not worry about them....

... but I am still interested in hearing from anyone show knows if a two-step redirect passes any value?

It might. But redirect chains are problematic for search engines.

Matt Cutts:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-interview-googles-matt-cutts-on-redirects-trust-more


One or two doesn't sound to appealing, especially in combination with "usually".

Here it says that 301's pass anchor text value, but a strong side note that Google remains the right to devalue or deteriorate link juice if it goes through 301. If all your backlinks pass through 301 that wouldn't be the best thing to have for a backlink domain.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70LR8H8pn1M

Bing's Brett Yount claims "it does not like redirect chains", whatever that may mean:
http://www.bing.com/community/forums/p/657799/9587538.aspx#9587538


So Google and Bing seem to able to follow very short 301 redirect chains, but they both seem not too keen on them, and therefor it wouldn't surprise me at all if redirect chains don't pass full value for both these engines.

Wow, thanks for all the info guys!

I'm going to just delete them. Should I delete them from the original domain that was 301'ing them AND the new domain or just the new domain?

Thanks!

Be sure to check and check the 301's once finished...

1, clear your history and catch and check the site over and over again.

2, use a good http header checker tool like http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html

or

http://web-sniffer.net/

To ensure it is serving up a 301 responce.

3, check the internal links on the pages especially the ones with absolute paths and run the pages through a link checker for broken links http://validator.w3.org/checklink/

4, Check your google webmaster tools account for 404 errors

Blah blah blah :-) just thought you properly don't need help on this :-) ?

I'm confused. It sounds like you are giving me instructions on how to do a 301 and recheck it.

What I'm going to do is *delete pages*.

Some of the pages that I'm going to delete are currently being 301'd. But since I'm going to delete the pages then shouldn't I kill the 301 instructions for the old domains while I'm at it?

Or just let them 301 to deleted web pages?

Does that make sense?

Ok... I'm sorry... I'm gonna drive you guys crazy.

If I delete all these pages then my google webmaster tools is going to display like fifty 404 errors for a long period of time isn't it?

Or will it be cool because I don't have anything linking to it anymore as I've updated all my new links to the new pages?

I'm worried because I have one page that I've done this too back in July it looks like and it's still coming up as an error even though there are no links to it on my current pages...

Some pertinent words from Google:

So it's common practice that everytime somebody deletes 50 or so webpages they put all of them as a nofollow in their robot.txt file?

I'm not afraid if google still has some of the pages listed in the search results as I'm setting up a custom 404 page with links but I'm afraid of having my webmaster tools panel flooded with errors and my current pages (not the ones I'm deleting) SEO being damaged from all the errors.

Last and final. If everybody was me... would they just delete the pages, setup the custom 404 page and be done with it or would they type every page deleted into a robot.txt file as a nofollow?


Thanks!

**added**

If it looks like I'm shooting down advise I'm not. Believe me! I'm just making sure we are all on the same page before I do anything to large of scale...